OAKLAND, Calif. — The trouble at Oakland’s General Strike on Wednesday started almost immediately.
The General Strike was called by the Occupy Oakland general assembly a week earlier, following a violent police eviction of protestors, in which an Iraq War veteran was critically injured.
Window smashing and graffiti followed the course of protestors around the downtown area. As I arrived at 3 p.m., black bloc anarchists were defacing the front of a Whole Foods, smashing a window and tearing up the fence and cafe area in front. Other protestors stepped in to defend the store, with one man in motorcycle leathers and a bright yellow motorcycle helmet taking on a group of the black bloc-styled vanguard of the protest single-handedly at one point.
Eventually drowned out by cries of “Peaceful Protest!” and pushed by the crowd, the black-clad marchers pushed on towards the lake, and some of the people behind them slowed near the ruined front of Whole Foods to pick up and return chairs and tables. The black-bloc faction smashed the fronts of banks and tagged much of Downtown Oakland with graffiti, while other protestors yelled and fought them.
The march to the port was overwhelming, and from the ground, impossible to count. Estimates from the police and Occupy Oakland supporters ranged from 7,000 on the probably-too-small-side to 40,000 on the definitely-too-big-side. More block party than protest, the march was punctuated with dancing and singing, children and pets running underfoot, and even a marching band playing in front of one of the port’s major entrances.
The protestors blocked tractor-trailers from entering or leaving the port, the fifth largest container port in America, for much of the evening. Around 8 p.m., when protestors heard that the next shift had been called off, word went along Maritime Street that the protest should declare victory and return to the occupied plaza. Thousands marched back, clogging the roads from the port to Downtown Oakland.
Trouble with the police started soon after, as some of the more radical elements of Occupy Oakland took over an unoccupied building on 16th Street sometime between 10 and 11 p.m. The building formerly housed the Traveler’s Aid Society of Alameda County, which helped transitional, at-risk people and families. It shut down due to budget cuts.
The occupiers tried to take over the building with the stated intention of turning it into a community center for the movement, but were quickly evicted by police in riot gear. Protestors then built a barricade on nearby Broadway Avenue, which protestors set fire to. The police moved in, using tear gas to disperse protestors, and set up lines around the area, fencing in the protests from one side, but allowing the crowd to disperse to the south.
A man, who looked to be in his 50s or 60s, was shot in the leg with a less-lethal round after approaching the line near the plaza. Medics rushed him into a doorway, before carrying him away to be treated alongside with people having tear gas washed out of their eyes. A few more tear gas canisters were fired as the police line shifted forward, until the police and protestors settled into new positions for the long haul through the night.
Very few of the police appeared to be from the Oakland police department, whose officers’ association had published an open letter the day before blasting the mayor’s office for inconsistency in the policies around the city’s occupation. Most were sheriffs from Alameda and surrounding counties, some as far away as San Rafael in Marin County.
Against a background of chanting and the drone of a circling police helicopter overhead, a female police officer read a notice declaring the area to be an unlawful assembly. She told people to disperse south on Broadway, and ordered campers to return to their tents in the nearby plaza. After reading the notice several times she fell silent, the line advanced slightly, and then nothing at all happened.
The police and protestors alike waited for something to change. To pass time protestors chanted, sang, and danced. When they talked to the police line, officers stared impassively back, their expressions unreadable behind their visors. Occasionally the police would shift officers in and out, often prompting the crowd to run back or don masks in expectation of some new action. But the line remained calm, and the crowd would come back forward, talking to them, shouting, singing, drumming, chanting.
“Whose streets? Our streets!”
“Who are you? We are Oakland!”
“You’re sexy, you’re cute! Take off your riot suit!”
“Tell me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!”
One man, too lightly clothed for the steadily chilling early morning air, sat off on his own from the chanters, arms crossed, with a dust mask perched on his head. He sat on a window ledge, surrounded by a dangerous looking pile of broken glass, which had fallen when someone broke the window of a local clothing store called Oakollectiv. The store had closed that day to support the general strike. Someone had hung a black cloth over the broken window with duct tape.
He was Chris Lukens, a 28-year-old bartender originally from Providence, RI who now lives in Oakland and works in San Francisco. Lukens has a degree in screenwriting, but said it’s bartending that’s let him ride out much of the economic troubles of the last few years, because, he explained laughing, when times are bad, people always want a drink.
“I got out of work tonight and came down here at about 11:30. I saw this window busted in, of a business I know for a fact is owned by people from Oakland,” Lukens said. “I started talking to the people protecting it.”
The man looking after the window when he arrived was named Adam, and Adam said he’d taken over sentry duty from Mike. Adam was the third person to protect the window in the three hours it had been guarded by the occupiers.
But Adam had to work in the morning.
“He had to go, and I took it up,” said Lukens. “Tomorrow’s my day off.”
He hasn’t been with Occupy Oakland for long.
“I wasn’t that into the Occupy movement, to be honest with you, I’m a little bit of cynic,” said Lukens. “Until they started putting people in the hospital for exercising their free speech, and then it became something I felt like I needed to be a part of.”
Another occupier, Anthony, said he saw the Oakollectiv window broken, and showed me where someone tagged the building with graffiti, right next to where Lukens was sitting.
As protesters scuffled with the tagger and his crew, one of the crew broke the window, according to Anthony.
As for the tagger, “He just wanted his name, that’s what he’s here for, so he can take a picture for his Facebook and say ‘I tagged such and such,'” Anthony said.
Close to 3 a.m., one of the owners of Oakollectiv, alerted either by Lukens’ texts or the building guard, arrived and introduced himself to Lukens, still sitting on the ledge surrounded by shards of glass.
“Thank you so much,” he said to Lukens, shaking his hand.
Lukens plans to propose to the Oakland general assembly that they donate funds to help local businesses replace the broken windows.
“It’s unfair to them that their stuff gets stolen because people want to demonstrate free speech, and a few people have to go ruin it for the rest of them,” Lukens said. “So I’ll be here as long as the cops don’t push me back.”
As I departed around 4 a.m., a middle-aged woman from the occupation had begun cleaning graffiti and paint off windows with rags, sponges, and a spray bottle. A younger man on a bicycle stopped and watched her for a moment, got off his bike, silently grabbed a rag and began to clean the next window over.
Photos: Quinn Norton/Wired
This post is part of a special series from Quinn Norton, who is embedding with Occupy protestors and going beyond the headlines with Anonymous for Wired.com. For an introduction to the series, read Quinn’s description of the project.
